Publications

Educators

Purchase

September–October 2012
Article

One-Switch Conditions for Multiattribute Utility Functions

By: Ali E. Abbas and David E. Bell

We introduce a variety of new independence conditions for multiattribute utility functions that permit preference dependencies among the attributes of a decision problem. The hierarchy of new conditions varies in the degree to which it specifies the functional form,... View Details

Keywords: One-switch; Utility Independence; Risk Aversion; Multiattribute Utility; Decision Making

October 2024 (Revised February 2025)
Case

Lanco Medical Group: Fostering Happiness for Growth

By: Susanna Gallani, Jenyfeer Martínez Buitrago and Katherine Sonnefeldt

This case describes how Lanco Medical Group, a fast-growing pharmaceutical distributor serving Latin America, approached the design of their employee benefits and incentives program. After learning about gaps between what leadership believed motivated employees and... View Details

Keywords: Fairness; Compensation and Benefits; Retention; Growth Management; Motivation and Incentives; Expansion; Pharmaceutical Industry; Latin America

Educators

July 2024
Article

Acceptance of Automated Vehicles Is Lower for Self than Others

By: Stuti Agarwal, Julian De Freitas, Anya Ragnhildstveit and Carey K. Morewedge

Road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death worldwide for people aged 2–59. Nearly all deaths are due to human error. Automated vehicles could reduce mortality risks, traffic congestion, and air pollution of human-driven vehicles. However, their adoption... View Details

Keywords: Transportation; Risk and Uncertainty; Technology Adoption; Prejudice and Bias

2017
Working Paper

A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy

By: Matthew Weinzierl

I propose and formalize an argument for why economists working in the welfarist normative tradition should include nonwelfarist principles in how they judge economic policy. The key idea behind this argument is that the world is too complex, and our ability to model it... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Policy; Economics

SSRN

10 Jan 2023
Op-Ed

Time to Move On? Career Advice for Entrepreneurs Preparing for the Next Stage

table for you? Maybe you spent the last decade in e-commerce and you’d like to try an adjacent area like marketing technology or retail? What type of people do you prefer to not work with? View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

Article

An Integrated Decision-Making Approach for Improving European Air Traffic Management

By: Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Bert De Reyck and Zeger Degraeve

We develop a multistakeholder, multicriteria decision-making framework for Eurocontrol, the European air traffic management organization, for evaluating and selecting operational improvements to the air traffic management system. The selected set of improvements will... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Framework; Operations; Performance Improvement; Government Administration; Air Transportation Industry; Europe

Purchase

Research Summary

Is there an especially large endowment effect for virtuous choices?

Ben's research focuses on issues of self-control. Specifically, his work on the endowment effect (the finding that people value things more once they own them). His work suggests that the size of the endowment effect is influenced by the type of... View Details

16 Apr 2020
Blog Post

Am I Eligible for the 2+2 Program?

We receive quite a few questions about eligibility for the 2+2 Program, so we thought we’d put together a blog post to outline the basics and share answers to some FAQs. You can also download the 2+2 Program Brochure to learn more. First... View Details

2019
Working Paper

Labor Market Shocks and the Demand for Trade Protection: Evidence from Online Surveys

By: Rafael Di Tella and Dani Rodrik

We study preferences for government action in response to layoffs resulting from different types of labor-market shocks. We consider the following shocks: technological change, a demand shift, bad management, and three kinds of international outsourcing. Respondents... View Details

Keywords: Labor; Markets; System Shocks; Trade; Attitudes; Surveys

26 Feb 2018
Research & Ideas

The Airbnb Effect: Cheaper Rooms for Travelers, Less Revenue for Hotels

amenities, like a kitchen. And if you still prefer a hotel room, competition from Airbnb means you'll pay a lower price for it." Airbnb's rapid growth Airbnb, an online community marketplace where... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Travel

01 Jun 2022
News

A Sustainable Solution for Fashion

demand shifts by season. Brands and retailers must correctly stock items in their customers’ preferred color, pattern, style, fit, and price without much historical data. “Most of the software out there is backward looking and purely... View Details

Keywords: April White

2014
Working Paper

Search-Based Peer Firms: Aggregating Investor Perceptions Through Internet Co-Searches

By: Charles M.C. Lee, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang

Applying a "co-search" algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC's EDGAR web-site, we develop a novel method for identifying economically-related peer firms and for measuring their relative importance. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent... View Details

Keywords: Peer Firm; EDGAR Search Traffic; Revealed Preference; Co-search; Industry Classification; Analytics and Data Science; Internet and the Web; Mathematical Methods; Corporate Finance

SSRN

Article

How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay

By: Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael I. Norton

Do people from different countries and different backgrounds have similar preferences for how much more the rich should earn than the poor? Using survey data from 40 countries (N = 55,238), we compare respondents' estimates of the wages of people in different... View Details

Keywords: Inequality; Justice; Wage; Cross-cultural; Wages; Equality and Inequality; Fairness; Income; Employees; Management Teams; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues

01 Sep 2023
News

Research Brief: Making Way for Moonshots

Josh Krieger (Courtesy subject) Josh Krieger (Courtesy subject) Many innovations in modern medicine have come about due to cutting-edge drugs—advances that required both a scientific leap and a willingness to take risks. And while most pharmaceutical companies would... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint

04 Oct 2010
Research & Ideas

Introverts: The Best Leaders for Proactive Employees

We often expect corporate executives to conform to certain extroverted CEO stereotypes: C for charismatic, E for effusive, and O for outgoing. To wit: Virgin Group chairman... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

01 Apr 1996
News

Technology for Learning's Sake

view PC users from the United Kingdom discussing their computer-related preferences and needs and then heard European marketing managers from Intel Corporation state the company's marketing priorities. Those same executives then turned to... View Details

Keywords: by Deborah Blagg; photo by David Zadig

Article

Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-based Taxation

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. When expressing their preferences over allocations in stylized, hypothetical scenarios meant to isolate key... View Details

Keywords: Optimal Taxation; Welfarism; Luck; Benefit-based Taxation; Taxation; Equality and Inequality; Attitudes